From Ken Burns. Premieres October 2nd, 3rd & 4th, 2011 at 8 PM on PBS:
Watch the full episode. See more Ken Burns.
PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed. Prohibition was intended to improve, even to ennoble, the lives of all Americans, to protect individuals, families, and society at large from the devastating effects of alcohol abuse. But the enshrining of a faith-driven moral code in the Constitution paradoxically caused millions of Americans to rethink their definition of morality. Read more…
Brendan Kiley talked to Burns about the parallels between That Prohibition and This Prohibition (drugs):
Of course. The parallels are endless. The folly of enforcement, the impossibility of enforcement, how enforcement itself becomes its own center of corruption, the absurdity of ‘victimless crime.’ And there are many other parallels as well: lack of civil discourse in our conversations, the demonization of immigrants… parallels that are extraordinarily contemporary. They’re almost scarily contemporary, as modern as anything that’s going on today—and I mean today. In today’s headlines.
I assume the series will be good; I wonder, will it capture or alter the zeitgeist.